HTTP POST to external ASPX form causing a HTTP 405 error in some cases

Question

I have a situation where we're aggregating what amounts to marketing data from N number of clients, where a client can host a HTML form using any backend of their choice, each with the action of the form pointing to a path that we're hosting. Each client has a different URL, there's no auth (but there is some simple validation of the data) and it's all generally working just fine.

However, there's one small wrinkle that I can't seem to get my head around.

The aspx that is processing the submitted data resides at a path, let's call it ~/submit/default.aspx. The idea is that we should be able to hand to our partner a URL along the lines of "http://sample.com/submit/?foo=bar" as the action of their form. Doing this however results in a HTTP 405 error, "Resource not allowed".

Having the action of the form set as "http://sample.com/submit/default.aspx" works just fine and dandy however.

• Default.aspx is set as one of the default document names in IIS 6.
• The .aspx file extension is properly mapped to the correct .Net dll and has the verbs GET, HEAd, POST, and DEBUG activated for the mapping.

Those were the only two things I could think of to double check first--anyone else have any ideas? I'd have preferred to use URL rewriting / routing with IIS7, but that's unfortunately not an option--and I have a number of additional requirements where "clean" URLs will highly be preferable, so solving this problem is going to be a pretty core problem to get through.

Answer 1

IIRC, IIS will only use the default docs if the requested resource is a directory. Since the requested resource in the first case is not, it'll never make it through the default doc handlers - instead failing on a POST to an unregistered script extension (405).

Answer 2

it may depend on the document type of "http://sample.com/submit/?foo=bar"... if you IIS doesn't know how to handle the document type being returned to it (which then returns it to you, the client), then you may get an http 405 error - which means that it doesn't know how to handle that document type, server-wise. Maybe try putting something like in your web.config file that drives the app. HTTP Handlers are modular pieces of code, written and compiled in a .net language, and act as kind of a 'servlet' if you're familiar with Java terms. It's a piece of code that writes out something to the client -- in your case maybe a rendering of a .doc file, found programmatically in your handler class.

good luck, www.robertnetherton.com

Answer 3

for some reason, it didn't render my code sample!! you guys need to decode and encode less than and greater than signs for your "Your Answer" text box.... anyways,
<httpHandlers> <add verb="your.class.to.handle.doc.files"/> </httpHandlers> is what should be in your web.config file.